The gap between a dog-eared sheaf of scribbles and a handsome hardback can seem daunting enough for adults, but for children and teenagers it can seem an insurmountable chasm. And yet the best writing by children and teenagers can be astonishingly poignant, hilarious, and indeed helpful. Alec Greven's How to Talk to Girls contains dating tips from which males considerably older than nine could benefit. ("You don't have to try too hard, but try to look kind of clean.")

Of course, publishers should naturally be wary of publishing young people's work simply because they're young and have produced a novel, focusing on the hook and turning a blind eye to the quality. In your early teens, you're not necessarily aware of how derivative your literary outpourings are, and the extent to which your reading shapes your writing; and you may not yet be sufficiently master of your own voice to take on high-falutin' genres like fantasy and romance. (I speak from experience. At 13, I was passionately devoted to a high-fantasy epic featuring Dallien the dark prince, a charger called Bayard whom I'd pinched from Prince Caspian without realising it, and a large, coniferous forest – Mirkwood after the emigration of the spiders.)

Nancy Yi Fan, author of the Swordbird series, is to be praised for her perseverance in producing two novels, to date, with another one on the way, but HarperCollins is perhaps less to be commended for giving her Redwall-lite juvenilia a wider audience than the sachet-scented interior of a dresser drawer. Yi Fan is obviously a very talented teenage writer, but her often infelicitous phrasing ("'Why do you want me to swallow your essence?' the white bird asked at last") and the heavy-handedness of her good v evil take on her avian universe suggests that the publisher would have done better to wait for her to mature a little more before rushing her into print. (Also, birds do not fight with swords. Their birdy little feet cannot possibly grip the hilts.)

For a writer's youthfulness to be apparent throughout their work is not always a bad thing, however. I recently read The Young Visiters in full for the first time, and had no difficulty seeing why Daisy Ashforth's novella, written when she was nine, had become so popular. Its famous opening line ("Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him") perfectly sets the tone of what's to follow – the mixture of precocious knowledge and deep mystification about certain "not-talked-about" aspects of her society ("The bearer of this letter is an old friend of mine not quite the right side of the blanket as they say in fact he is the son of a first rate butcher but his mother was a decent family called Hyssopps of the Glen so you see he is not so bad and is desireus of being the correct article") makes for uncontrollable, snorting chuckles with every page.

Ms Ashford's feminine preoccupation with clothing is also a source of unalloyed pleasure – the passage when Mr Salteena visits Royalty with the legs of his evening suit rolled up to simulate knickerbockers, a silver-paper star on his chest, to the apparent approval of all, will remain a perennial favourite. Daisy Ashford's opus retains its charm because of the distorting filter of her brilliant nine-year-old's perspective on the social norms and anxieties of her day.

The most famous piece of published writing by a young author, Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, is also remarkable for preserving the years of self-discovery and greatest change between child and adult. The tragic circumstances of her cloistered life have allowed a degree of self-revelation that would have otherwise been unthinkable. Anne's parents and sister madden her with the reiterated statement that "she's going through a phase", and she responds, inevitably, with "No one understands me!"

At my high-fantasy stage, the idea of publication was a distant dream in a glossy jacket, and one that I never thought would be realised, possibly because in my heart of hearts I knew my magnum opus was still unripe. But while the world is richer for being denied the tale of Dallien, I'd like to see more funny, esoteric ideas immortalised for wider audiences, and talented young writers' persistence rewarded with the solid weight of their published work, without waiting nearly 20 years to see their books given an airing in smart jackets as Daisy Ashford did.

We can risk some sword-fighting avians if they help open the world of publishing to younger authors before they lose the joy of the written word altogether.